Try Customer Relationship Management

Ricardo Harvin
E-mail questions for Tech Tools to techtools@uschamber.com.

As important as it is to get customers, understanding their relationship with your business is just as important.

Unless you have only a small handful of customers, it's easy to lose track of how you're interacting-or failing to interact-with them when you're focused on what needs to get done today. But having a clear view of those interactions can open your eyes to sales opportunities and to relationships that may have reached their useful end.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products are designed to help you gain better insight into how to improve the number and quality of customer transactions. CRM not only helps track when and how you're communicating with customers, but it also shows how well they're responding to the specific contact methods you're using so that you can tailor your marketing accordingly.

For example, CRM lets you know which customers respond best to mailed fliers versus e-mail coupons. Everyone is fighting against information overload, so why continue trying to generate sales using methods a customer consistently ignores?

It's easy to forget that a good customer at one time may not be a constant source of income. A good CRM solution helps you measure when a past customer is truly just that-a past customer-and helps you focus on other leads that you may have been neglecting.

Small business CRM products range in price from free to tens of thousands of dollars. Many of them can be customized to capture information specific to your company, and there are solutions suitable for every type and size of business.

The quality of information you'll get out of any CRM depends on the quality of information you put in. Some CRMs can tie in directly to your point-of-sale systems, making it easy to capture data from every sale. If you're already capturing customer information in a spreadsheet or database, you should be able to import that data into a CRM. Otherwise, you may have to manually enter transactions, contacts, and other information to build up your base of information.

You spend a lot of time and money acquiring customers. The right CRM can help you build more customer relationships to generate repeat business, increasing the return on investment of your marketing dollars and keeping your cash flow steady and your bottom line healthy.

E-Sources:

Tech Tools Article, "Analyze Your Sales Data: Help Identify Your Best Customers"
Open Source Sugar CRM